proprietary drivers or opensource drivers for ATI on Linux?

>>57490088
Why not try both and judge for yourself?

>>57490088
>radeon
>linux
Go with intel or nvidia.

>>57490088
Depends

Distro older than 2016, and/or Pre-GCN GPU -> FGLRX
Distro newer than 2016 and GCN GPU -> Radeon/AMDGPU + Mesa RadeonSI

If you have a GCN GPU and you are reluctant to upgrade to a newer distro because you'll lose FGLRX stop worrying, the open drivers are as fast or faster than Catalyst in most games.

>>57490114
Nvidia's proprietary driver is faster, but it has graphical corruption issues and other problems stemming from its closed source nature that aren't problems with the open drivers.
Intel's driver is ok for desktop use in most cases, but it has problems with high resolutions in some situations and its lack of performance makes games unplayable. The idea that 'intel has the best open driver' is no longer true AMD has caught up.

>>57490289
Oh also be aware that Nvidia only has a speed advantage in many games at lower resolutions. If you're running at 1440p or 2160p the open source AMD drivers can frequently be just as fast due to the reduced cpu overhead.

I used the open source driver for my card, it raped it non stop even at idle and with Xfce as my DE. It is an older card so I needed to install an older distro to get Catalyst 13.1.

Have no idea what the open source driver is like for newer cards but for older cards it is utter garbage.

I always have issues with AMD GPU drivers on Linux

A GT430 on the proprietary Nvidia drivers outperformed a brand new RX460 wit the AMDGPUpro drivers

>>57490289
good to know, opensource is better now than before, i'm using and i will keep ...

>>57490454
Even the proprietary drivers for pre-gcn cards are basically done even on Windows. If you're still using something that old its time to replace it.

>>57490484
That seems unlikely, or at least should only be possible in some kind of special case. In most of the benchmarks I've seen a 460 should be performing better than a 750ti. Both cards are too slow to run into the kinds of cpu limitations that make a Fury slower than a 950 in some situations but I suppose at a low enough resolution with a shitty enough cpu you could get that kind of result.

Unfortunately right now good performance on open drivers is most doable on a high end setup like mine with a 2160p monitor and a very fast recent CPU.

>>57490650
It is an old laptop I got for free, only going to be used for when I am away from my PC, no point buying something else when it will work just fine.

The biggest gripe I have with Linux is the awful power management. I shouldn't have to install additional tools straight off just to get reasonable power usage. It seems as though the distro's see power management as little more than an afterthought. linux mint for example doesn't even allow the user to manually switch the power savings mode it provides on unless it is running on battery. When it is plugged in you can't enable battery mode, the only way to do it is via installing laptop mode tools. Unless I have battery mode enabled the fans are running hard, which is very annoying not to mention a waste of power.

>>57490114
Or you can go with ATI or AMD and get decent performance. With Nvidia you need to install binary blobs and with Intel the GPUs are just garbage anyway.

>>57490088
Depends: on older cards you can user fglrx but in my own experience is pretty bad, that's why it was deprecated, so in general i would recommend open source for older cards.

For newer cards you can use AMDGPU or AMDGPU PRO, the second uses open source modules but the OGL implementation in the user space is proprietary. Apparently the open source driver is catching the closed source one so in a pair of years the answer will probably be open source always.

going to depend largely on distro and the age of your ATI/AMD card, but a few things to note:

- 3D performance between open source and proprietary drivers is a chasm. They may have improved since the last time I've attempted using them, but I recall abysmal performance using open source ATI/AMD drivers compared to the proprietary ones.

- Proprietary Catalyst drivers, despite their better performance, have abysmal support. If you're using an older card, or even newer cards in many circumstances, you may need to use an older version of xorg for the shit to even work. It is a pain in the dick.

- Open source drivers typically have better 2D support, from my understanding.

which one is better for you is going to largely depend on your type of usage and the age of your card. I would definitely advise testing both out.

>>57492433
Everything from like Radeon HD 2000 series and up at least runs fairly well. I wont try to say they have better performance than catalyst/fglrx but they have acceptable performance with the benefit of far greater stability. Plus you don't really have to install anything to make use of the open source drivers, except for on pure GNU distros like Debian where you have to install the firmware images yourself.

>>57492499
have they made improvements in the past 2-3 years? I remember a long time ago trying to play Mount&Blade Warband with a 4850x2 and open source drivers and it was only playable at VGA resolution, whereas the proprietary drivers ran fine with the exception of crashing the game every so often.

>>57492525
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=massive_linux_gpus&num=1

Well it still varies pretty wildly from game to game but overall there have been a number of improvements to the open source drivers in the last few years. I can't say how your card would perform but it might be interesting to try it and see.

AMD added like all of their catalyst development team to the open source radeon DRM driver recently which significantly accelerated the development of the driver(at least for GCN GPUs). On GCN they intend for the radeon DRM driver to become the only driver in the kernel with the fglrx kernel module being phased out.

>>57492669
Although there is a pretty significant drawback with the open source drivers, a dual GPU card like that wouldn't run properly on the open source drivers. The radeon devs have not gotten around to supporting crossfire yet and it's not likely that they will get to it on the older terascale cards anytime soon.